In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences, and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration, urbanization, economic development, and social and cultural history. Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. land into modem civilization. ", This page was last edited on 7 March 2023, at 19:02. In broad terms, the further west, the more American the community. The bison herd still lives on the grounds of Fermilab. [35] However his ideas presented in his graduate seminars at Wisconsin and Harvard influenced many areas of historiography. Imports over the same period also increased substantially, from $238 million in 1865 to $616 million in 1898. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. %PDF-1.4 % Later Digital History Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady The American frontier began when the British colonialists settled in North America in the 17th century and ended with the admission of New Mexico and Arizona in Though Turners view would win over the Germanic germ theorys version of Western history, the theory persisted for decades after Turners thesis enraptured the American Historical Association. Jackson Turner As of 1865, the U.S. State Department had barely sixty employees and no ambassadors representing American interests abroad. Volume XLI, Sept 19, 1975, p. 2. "The frontier trail: rethinking Turner and reimagining the American West." [1] Turner's text follows in a long line of thought within the framework of Manifest Destiny established decades earlier. The frontier, they argued, shaped uniquely American institutions such as revivals, camp meetings, and itinerant preaching. ", Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation back upon itself. Writing that imperious will and force had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. In so doing, the Anglo-Saxons and the Germanic peoples descendants, being exposed to a forest like their Teutonic ancestors, birthed the free political institutions that formed the foundation of American government.[7]. Omissions? Their good intentions and willingness to work in difficult conditions shone through in the letters and articles they wrote from the field. Fearing future loss of the territory through military conflict, as well as desiring to create challenges for Great Britain (which they had fought in the Crimean War), Russia had happily accepted the American purchase offer. [28] FDR, in celebrating the third anniversary of Social Security in 1938, advised, "There is still today a frontier that remains unconqueredan America unreclaimed. It explained why the American people and American government were so different from their European counterparts. Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and James R. Grossman, Barlow and Kapor (1990) "The Electronic Frontier", Barlow (1996) "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", Rod Carveth, and J. Metz, "Frederick Jackson Turner and the democratization of the electronic frontier.,", A.C. Religious leaders and Progressive reformers joined businesses in their growing interest in American expansion, as both sought to increase the democratic and Christian influences of the United States abroad. (1993), Ford, Lacy K. "Frontier democracy: The Turner thesis revisited. of the Frontier The essay summarizes Turner's views on how the idea of the American frontier shaped the American character in terms of democracy and violence. The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle, he wrote; in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science. Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.. [36] Moos (2002) shows that the 1910s to 1940s black filmmaker and novelist Oscar Micheaux incorporated Turner's frontier thesis into his work. This is the frontierthe Americawe have set ourselves to reclaim. Furthermore, there is a need to escape the confines of the State. In 1946, medieval historian Carl Stephenson published an extended article refuting the Germanic germ theory. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. in Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, Chapter 16), http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/isern/103/turner.htm. Cushing T.A. Only if gold were to be found, the editors decried, would the secretive purchase be justified. In his 1890 work, The Influence of Seapower upon History, he suggested three strategies that would assist the United States in both constructing and maintaining an empire. The age of expansionism had come to a close once the national boundaries reached both the west and east coasts O American democracy was largely formed by the American frontier Expansion had been a dominant part of American life for three centuries O The American "Turnerians all: the dream of a helpful history in an intelligible world. Later he focused on sectionalism as a force in U.S. development. 0000020789 00000 n Please enter a term before submitting your search. Even after independence, the eastern coast of the United States sought to control the West. Everything in American history up to the 1880s somehow relates the western frontier, including slavery. "Frederick Jackson Turner Overlooked the Ladies. A small herd of American bison was started at the lab's founding to symbolize Fermilab's presence on the frontier of physics and its connection to the American prairie. 1981 Oxford University Press This was particularly true among women missionaries, who composed over 60 percent of the overall missionary force. The English Empire, 16601763, Chapter 5: Imperial Reforms and Colonial Protests, 1763-1774, Chapter 6: America's War for Independence, 1775-1783, Chapter 7: Creating Republican Governments, 17761790, Chapter 8: Growing Pains: The New Republic, 17901820, Chapter 9: Industrial Transformation in the North, 18001850, Chapter 10: Jacksonian Democracy, 18201840, Chapter 11: A Nation on the Move: Westward Expansion, 18001860, Chapter 12: Cotton is King: The Antebellum South, 18001860, Chapter 13: Antebellum Idealism and Reform Impulses, 18201860, Chapter 14: Troubled Times: the Tumultuous 1850s, Chapter 16: The Era of Reconstruction,1865-1877, Chapter 17: Go West Young Man! Many of Turners best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. Frederick Jackson Turner Her true passion, however, was to evangelize and minister, and she undertook a campaign to urge the Southern Baptist missionaries to allow women to work beyond the classroom. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association, serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the associations American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Urban historian Richard C. Wade challenged the Frontier Thesis in his first asset, The Urban Frontier (1959), asserting that western cities such as Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati, not the farmer pioneers, were the catalysts for western expansion. He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. Updates? [2], Australian historian Brett Bowden has explored how the concept of "frontier" has been very widely used in both the scholarly and the popular literature to denote challenging new forces. "[22], Historians, geographers, and social scientists have studied frontier-like conditions in other countries, with an eye on the Turnerian model. The frontier line, which separates civilization from wilderness, is the most rapid and effective Americanization on the continent; it takes the European from across the Atlantic and shapes him into something new. Turner sets up the East and the West as opposing forces; as the West strives for freedom, the East seeks to control it. Turner A year after the Oklahoma Land Rush, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the frontier was closed. Finally, Mahan urged the future construction of a canal across the isthmus of Central America, which would decrease by two-thirds the time and power required to move the new navy from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. His essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and Significance of Sections in American History (1932, Pulitzer Prize). 0000101861 00000 n Frederick Jackson Turner, Significance of the Frontier He taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Harvard University. An example of this concern is in George Wilson Piersons influential essay on the frontier. Roosevelt contended that the formation of the American character occurred not with early settlers struggling to survive while learning a foreign land, but on the cutting edge of expansion in the early battles with Native Americans in the New World. The process of westward expansion had transformed a desolate and savage The Census of 1890 and the Closing of the Frontier.
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